Waldo Benevidez on Immigration

Though no website could be found for the Walter Benevidez campaign, his views were outlined in an April 16, 2006 article in the New York Times. The article was entitled "3 Perspectives On Immigration," and Benevidez's role offered "A Liberal's Contrarian Views," as quoted below.

Mr. Benavidez has spent most of his adult life working on behalf of the poor. For the last 25 years he has managed the community center and a food bank here on Denver's west side, where low-income families can get groceries. He marched for civil rights in the 1960's and relishes the memory of his first vote for president, for John F. Kennedy, in 1960.

But immigration's tangled implications have pushed him out of his comfortable old political box with its predictably liberal labels and causes. Supporting the poor in America, he said, now means shutting down the system that has created a flood of even poorer immigrants from Mexico...

Mr. Benavidez, whose ancestors have been in the West for 250 years, since the days of the Spanish empire, supports sealing the Mexican border, and is working for a proposed ballot proposition here in Colorado that would deny government social services to illegal immigrants.

He rails against multinational corporations that he says have rigged the political systems of the United States and Mexico to keep the border porous as a tool for suppressing wages and labor unions.